Ross Granville Harrison

American biologist (1870–1959)

Ross Granville Harrison (January 13, 1870 – September 30, 1959) was an American biologist and anatomist credited for his pioneering work on animal tissue culture. His work also contributed to the understanding of embryonic development. Harrison studied in many places around the world and made a career as a university professor. He was also a member of many learned societies and received several awards for his contributions to anatomy and biology.

Harrison received his early schooling in Baltimore, where his family had moved from Germantown, Philadelphia. Announcing in his mid teens a resolve to study medicine, he entered Johns Hopkins University in 1886, receiving his BA degree in 1889 at the age of nineteen. In 1890, he worked as a laboratory assistant for the United States Fish Commission in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, studying the embryology of the oyster with his close friend E. G. Conklin and H. V. Wilson. In 1891, he participated in a marine zoology field trip to the Chesapeake Zoological Laboratory Harrison was instrumental in the 1913 opening of the university laboratory, Osborn Memorial Laboratory, and served as its director beginning in 1918. In 1914, Harrison was the Medical School's chief advisor on staffing. He was made the Sterling Professor of Biology in 1927 and kept these three titles until his retirement in 1938, when he was made Yale's Professor Emeritus. He was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society in 1940. He gave the 1948 49 Silliman Memorial Lecture: Organization and Development of the Embryo, published posthumously in 1969.

Harrison successfully cultured frog neuroblasts in a lymph medium, proving that nerve fibers develop without a preexisting bridge or chain and that tissues can be grown outside of the body. He published the results of his studies in 1907. This part of Harrison's research was the first step toward current research on precursor and stem cells. While Harrison himself didn't develop this area of research any further, he encouraged others to. Harrison published the results of this study in 1921 in the Journal of Experimental Zoology in a paper titled "On relations of symmetry in transplanted limbs". The first world war was not a happy time for Harrison, with his pacifist leanings and his German wife and studies, but he persevered with embryology, working upon the symmetries of development. Although a keen morphogeneticist and an admirer of Goethe, Harrison himself did not philosophise much in his papers and, being somewhat reserved and diffident in his social dealings despite his warm feelings for his students' attainment, did not enjoy lecturing but chiefly confined himself to organisation, publication (his textbook illustrations have been highly praised) and patient experiment. He remained a keen walker all his life and is presumed to have died in New Haven.